---
title: 'Alembic'
sidebarTitle: 'Alembic'
---

Alembic is a migration tool for SQLAlchemy. It is a flexible tool for managing database migrations.
Below, we'll walk through the process of setting up Alembic in a project and running your first migration.

We'll start with an example project that has Alembic already set up, and you can
follow along with the steps below. Alternatively, you can run these steps in your own project.

## Running an Example Migration

<Steps>
  <Step title="Clone the example project">

```bash
git clone https://github.com/niledatabase/niledatabase
cd niledatabase/examples/migrations/alembic
```

  </Step>

  <Step title="Set up the environment and install dependencies">

```bash
virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
# install alembic, sqlalchemy, psycopg2-binary and dotenv
pip install -r requirements.txt
# alembic init alembic # run this if you install alembic in your own project
```

  </Step>

  <Step title="Create a Migration Script">

In the example project, we have a migration script already created.
You can find it in the `./alembic/versions` directory.

Here's how to create a new migration script:

```bash
alembic revision -m "create account table"
```

This will generate a new file: `./alembic/versions/13379be60997_create_account_table.py`. Now we want to edit the file and add the migration script to it:

```py
def upgrade():
    op.create_table(
        'account',
        sa.Column('id', sa.Integer, primary_key=True),
        sa.Column('name', sa.String(50), nullable=False),
        sa.Column('description', sa.Unicode(200)),
    )

def downgrade():
    op.drop_table('account')
```

  </Step>

  <Step title="Connect to Database">

To connect Alembic to the right database, create a `.env` file and add the connection string there:

```
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@host:5432/dbname
```

You can get your connection string from the Nile database home page.

  </Step>

  <Step title="Run the Migration">

```bash
alembic upgrade head
```

Thats it! You can connect to your database and see the new table.

  <Tip>
  If you see an error that the table already exists, double check that you didn't accidentally create a second 
  migration with the `accounts` table on top of the existing one. If this happened to you, you can delete the new migration file (or alternatively, modify the table name).
  </Tip>
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Generating Migrations

Alembic can also generate migrations for you. This is useful if you want to create a migration for a new table.

<Steps>

  <Step title="Create a new migration">

The example project has a `models.py` file that defines two models: `Todo` and `Tenant`.

To generate a migration for these models, you can use the following command:

```bash
alembic revision --autogenerate -m "create todo and tenant models"
```

<Tip>
  Alembic autogeneration compares your database state with models.py and will
  drop any tables not defined there. Since Nile has a built-in `Tenants` table
  that can't be dropped, we include the `Tenant` model in models.py to prevent
  this.
</Tip>

</Step>

<Step title="Run the generated migration file">

You can then edit the generated migration file (if needed) and run it like as we did before:

```bash
alembic upgrade head
```

</Step>

</Steps>

## Next Steps

This is the most basic use-case of Alembic. There is a lot more to it, which you can learn
from the official [Alembic documentation](https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/front.html).
